


I Can Hear (Your Heartbeat)

by SplinterCell



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (although not in detail), Abortion, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Angst, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Mpreg, Omega Brock Rumlow, arguments and reconciliation, as close to idfic as I can get
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:35:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23057827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SplinterCell/pseuds/SplinterCell
Summary: Ten weeks.Jesus. He should have caught it sooner than that. Another week or two and he might have started tosmell.
Relationships: Jack Rollins/Brock Rumlow
Comments: 5
Kudos: 30





	1. Chapter 1

What got to him—what _always_ got to him, every single time—was that no-one ever called it what it was.

His doctor this time was a young woman Brock thought couldn’t have been more than a few years out of med school. Then again, the older he got, the younger everyone else seemed to be, so maybe she had more years under her belt than her youthfulness suggested. At the very least, she had already mastered the air of polite disinterest he was more used to receiving from people much older.

“Congratulations, Mr Rumlow,” she said, in the same tone of voice she might have used to discuss what to make for dinner. She graced him with a small, tight smile that didn’t reach her eyes and slid a small rectangle of glossy paper across the desk. “Everything looks good.”

Brock reached out to take it, unable to keep his hands from trembling as he did so. “How many…?”

“Oh, just about ten weeks.”

The doctor was still talking—something about _next steps_ and _tests_ and _contacting_ _a midwife as soon as possible_ —but Brock wasn’t listening. 

Ten weeks. _Jesus._ He should have caught it sooner than that. Another week or two and he might have started to _smell_.

“I can’t keep it,” he cut in, and the doctor paused mid-sentence, her eyes narrowing at his choice of words. 

For the first time since he’d walked in, he had her full attention. “What do you mean you _can’t_ keep it?”

Brock let the question hang in the air between them for a long moment, before he dropped his eyes to his lap. “My alpha,” he mumbled. “We’re not—well, I mean, he isn’t…” He let the sentence trail off, and a quick glance up showed him that the doctor was staring at her computer screen as she considered the situation.

It was a technique he had learned from Pierce years ago: saying just enough for the other person to infer the rest, letting them fill in the gaps with whatever narrative they deemed the best fit, instead of having to construct a detailed lie each time.

Soon enough, she leaned back with a soft sigh. “Well, there are several options for termination,” she said at last, handing him a leaflet from a shelf beside her. “It’s all in here, but given you aren’t very far along, the pill will be the simplest and most, uh, _discreet_ choice. You will experience some cramping and bleeding, but the pregnancy will be expelled within a matter of hours and then you can flush the remains down the lavatory.”

The _pregnancy remains._

It wasn’t a new turn of phrase—every doctor at every clinic he’d ever been to had used it—but it still turned his stomach.

\---

No-one called it what it was, especially when it went wrong.

Forty-eight hours after taking the first medication, the clinic nurse watched him place four tablets between his cheek and upper gum, two on each side, and told him in no uncertain terms not to dawdle on his way home,

The cramping started right on schedule an hour later; the pain steadily ratcheting up until it drove him—doubled-over and gasping—to the bathroom. But though it kept him there for the next three hours, bleeding and sweating and panting, by the end of it no tissue had passed, and Brock realised with dawning horror that the almost impossible had happened. 

It hadn’t _worked_. 

It hadn’t worked, and Brock had to spend the next excruciating ten days on a mission in the freezing Canadian wilderness, terrified that his teammates—that _Jack_ —might smell that something was different before he could even call to make an emergency appointment.

“Oh, I _am_ sorry for the inconvenience, Mr Rumlow,” the receptionist said, making a low sympathetic noise into the receiver. He could hear her nails clicking against keys as she typed. “Now, let’s see… How early can you come in?”

\---

The sedative he had been given had kicked in by the time the doctor re-entered the room with a nurse and equipment in tow.

Brock rolled his head to the side until he could see them; a gentle-faced, grey-haired man and a middle-aged woman. They both smiled at him, but Brock couldn’t marshal his expression in time to return it. They exchanged quiet words as they moved around the room setting up, but his enhanced senses picked them up.

“I can’t believe he’s here alone for this,” the doctor murmured, and Brock thought he sounded just as kind as he looked. “Where’s his alpha?”

The nurse made a soft, unhappy noise. “Poor thing said he doesn’t have one.”

It wasn’t true—was about as far from the truth as it was possible to get—but Brock had learned early on that all it took was four simple words and a single downcast look, and no-one wanted to ask any further questions.

The nurse took a seat beside him as the doctor prepared him for the procedure, speaking to him in a low, soothing tone, and Brock was grateful for her presence even if he was too spaced out to follow everything she said.

He turned away and closed his eyes when a low hum filled the air. “Baby,” he murmured to no-one in particular, but the nurse must have heard him and gestured to the doctor because all of a sudden the machine was switched off again.

“What was that, sweetheart?” she asked, her hair tickling across his cheek as she leaned in closer.

She had pretty eyes, Brock thought when he turned back to look at her. Green eyes.

_Just like Jack’s._

His lip trembled as he struggled to find his voice. “Nothing,” he whispered, and he didn’t recognise his own broken voice. He closed his eyes and added, “It’s okay.”

The silence stretched and stretched, and Brock could imagine the looks they were trading over him. He cursed himself for giving them a reason to doubt him, drugged or not. He just wanted this over and done with; he _needed_ it to be over and done with, because if it wasn’t, and he had to go back, go _home—_

Then, just as something that might have turned into panic started creeping in at the edges of his mind, the machine hummed back to life, and the nurse took his hand in her own. He squeezed it as the machine sucked the stubborn little life right out of his womb, and she said nothing when tears slid down his cheeks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't like writing in the past tense. Feels bad, man.


	2. Chapter 2

No-one _ever_ called it what it was, and it never seemed to get any easier.

Brock didn’t think it ever would.

He was left alone in the recovery area as the sedative wore off, staring at the far wall with unseeing eyes while a radio filled the emptiness with soft music. This room, just like the others he had seen, had been painted a bright, bold yellow in the mistaken belief that the colour was warm and comforting. After all, yellow was the colour of the sun and flowers. It was meant to symbolise light, hope, and optimism.

It was a happy colour, but there was nothing happy about why he was in this room.

He leaned his head back against the wall and reached out blindly for his jacket beside him, groping through its pockets for the little photograph.

He knew he shouldn’t have kept it; certainly, he shouldn’t have brought it with him. Pierce would have considered it an inexcusable sign of weakness in his STRIKE Commander. But Pierce was none the wiser and, alone in the midst of such oppressive cheerfulness, Brock let himself be weak, idly rubbing his fingertips over the glossy surface in search of whatever comfort it could provide.

\---

The house was still and quiet when he got home. Jack wasn’t due back from his training for another three whole days; ample time for life to return to normal, Brock thought. Ample time for _him_ to return to normal.

He made a sandwich and ate it in the kitchen, staring absentmindedly out the window at their little overgrown garden. The grass had taken the opportunity provided by a warm and wet couple of weeks to shoot up, and the hedges had followed suit. The patch Jack had staked out for vegetables months ago was still overrun with weeds; the fence needed redoing; and the shed really had to be pulled down and replaced unless they could get away with repainting it for another-

He looked down suddenly and realised he had his free hand spread across his abdomen.

It was purely instinctual; Brock knew there was nothing there anymore. The nurse had steadfastly refused to let him look at the screen, but the doctor wouldn’t have let him leave without the ultrasound showing his womb was empty. Besides, he hadn’t even been twelve weeks along. He hadn’t even started to smell, let alone _show_.

The plate slipped from his fingers and smashed against the floor, ceramic shards skittering across the tiles, and Brock cursed. His knees popped loudly as he squatted down to sweep them up.

“It wasn’t anything, you dumb fuck,” he muttered hoarsely, jabbing the brush under the sink. “Nothing. Just a bunch of cells, that’s all.”

\---

Brock spent that night on the couch, wearing a pair of Jack’s sweatpants and one of his hoodies, wrapped in both his alpha’s comforting scent and a duvet he brought down from the bedroom, and then spent the entirety of the following day losing himself in a controlled frenzy of housework.

They had both been away so much recently that it wasn’t just the garden that needed attention. He started in the kitchen, scrubbing the floor, the walls, the units, and worktops until they were cleaner than they had probably ever been. The oven was next, then the hob, and then he moved onto the living room. He was methodical as he worked his way from room to room, cleaning away the dirt and detritus that collected when neither of them could spend more than 24 hours at home at a time.

He mopped and scrubbed, vacuumed, and dusted until his joints throbbed and his eyes stung from all the chemicals, and then he dragged himself up to bed—their bed—and fell asleep curled around Jack’s pillow.

\---

He wasn’t due back at the Trisk until Thursday, but Wednesday dawned grey and cold, and with the wind whipping the rain against the windows in a relentless drumbeat, Brock didn’t think he could stand to spend another day rattling around the house on his own.

The sun had only begun to peak over the horizon when Brock pulled into the Trisk’s garage. Only a handful of other vehicles were parked; he recognised Fury’s huge SUV and Romanoff’s ridiculous little sporty number but noted with relief that none of his team appeared to be in yet.

The locker room was empty at this hour, too. Brock stripped down to his boxers and carefully folded his civilian clothes before he put them in his locker and pulled out his uniform. SHIELD and Hydra were just two sides of the same coin. Brock was an ‘agent’ of one and an ‘asset’ to the other, and neither organisation had ever spared a single, solitary shit about their peoples’ wellbeing.

But that was fine. That was what he needed, at least for a little while. He needed to be _Rumlow_ and _Commander_ and _Agent_ until he felt ready to be _Brock_ again. He needed to lose himself in the mindlessness minutiae of management and the easy physicality of training, and to not think about tiny fingers and toes, or Jack’s large hands cradling a fragile body close to his chest, or the absence that still sat heavily in his abdomen.

Brock tugged his jacket over his shoulders, adjusting its fit like it was a piece of armour, and bared his teeth at the black-clad, hard-faced stranger staring back at him from the mirror.

_Perfect._

\---

Jack returned early on Friday from a week’s survival training with the rookies, and Brock managed to avoid him all day, right up until Sitwell called an emergency threat briefing late in the afternoon.

He had been down at the shooting range, so he was the last to arrive. The room was too small for the number of bodies crammed into it, but Jack had clearly been waiting for him and immediately waved him over to the seat he had saved, and Brock had no choice but to squeeze his way through to the front whilst his heart hammered in his chest.

“Welcome back,” Brock mouthed, and Jack smiled. 

And life—well, life went on, as it always did.

Wake up, go to work, carry out missions, go home, eat, sleep. Rinse and repeat; ad infinitum, ad nauseam, but Brock threw himself into the routine and took each day as it came, focussed on putting one foot in front of the other and ensuring that Jack stayed none the wiser.

Four weeks after Jack came home, Brock finally felt able to leave the photograph at home.


End file.
